There has been a lot of periods when fees where high, which is kinda bad for a payment system, because it makes it unreliable. So it's better to assume the worst case and just accept that onchain transactions are expensive.

And by design they will be getting more expensive, because blockspace is quite limited and can't be expanded to satisfy all demand. Plus miners will have to have fees as main source of reward in the future when block reward will get too small.